Despite the fact that Trudeau was accused of “manhandling” Conservative Whip Gord Brown – and elbowing Brosseau in the process – the NDP MP is on the receiving end of more than an elbow and is the target of online harassment that Brown is not.

Twitter trolls have accused Brosseau of “acting like a child” and playing a victim.

There have been a total of 5,459 Canadian tweets mentioning Brosseau and linking her to the elbow incident between May 18 and noon May 20, according to an analysis by Mark Blevis, a digital public affairs strategist with Full Duplex, for iPolitics.

Based on a random sampling of 200 tweets, some interesting patterns emerge.

Men were more likely to support Brosseau, though a lot of those positive mentions came in the form of retweets. Just over 42 per cent of tweets were positive, with men taking up 25.7 per cent and women taking 16.3 per cent of that amount. These were in cases when a gender could be identified.

Nearly 48 per cent of the sampling were negative or critical of Brosseau. Women were slightly more likely to make up that contingent, with 46.5 per cent of tweets coming from women and 44.6 per cent coming from men.

Most of these critical tweets said Brosseau gave an Oscar-worthy performance or that it was fitting for a soccer player. Some wondered whether the MP had ever taken public transportation or wondered how she could have worked as a bartender.

But the sharpest critics were those who felt Brosseau was demeaning violence against women and that she was setting a bad example for young women, according to the analysis. Much of the outrage connecting the elbow to gender-based violence came from colleagues in the NDP, not Brosseau, however.

Some were angry because they believed Trudeau hadn’t yet apologized to Brosseau, while others were upset because Brosseau hasn’t yet publicly accepted his apology.

Around 31.5 per cent of the sampled tweets were neutral when mentioning the elbow. Of those, men could be identified in 28.4 per cent of the tweets and women in 37.3 per cent.